In three books and numerous articles, Calum M. Carmichael argues for a radical transformation in the way the laws of Deuteronomy are to be understood. His most recent work, Law and Narrative in the Bible, maintains that the legal corpus of Deuteronomy, far from being “law,” rather constitutes “literature,” in which the Deuteronomistic historian reflects upon the full range of pre-exilic Israelite narrative, Genesis through 2 Kings. In the course of this argument, Carmichael makes fundamental assertions about the composition of Deuteronomy, the history of Israelite literature, and the history of interpretation. Carmichel introduces his work as an attempt “to overturn longstanding views on material that has always been in center stage in the study of the Bible” and as “radical in its results.” His work has already generated a series of further studies of narrative allusion and drafting techniques in Deuteronomy that presuppose his arguments.

The view that God is incorporeal, without body or parts, has been the hallmark of Christian orthodoxy, but in the beginning it was not so. In this article I show that ordinary Christians for at least the first three centuries of the current era commonly (and perhaps generally) believed God to be corporeal. The belief was abandoned (and then only gradually) as Neoplatonism became more and more entrenched as the dominant world view of Christian thinkers.

The biblical information concerning the figure of Nimrod is scarce. Post-biblical tradition has added supplementary details that cannot be found in the biblical text, however much they may be presented as results of exegesis of this text. This article first examines the biblical data about Nimrod and sees whether he can be identified with an extra-biblical, a pre-biblical, prototype. Second, it investigates the ways in which the few biblical data have given rise to post-biblical haggadic developments. K. van der Toorn has written the first part of this essay, P. W. van der Horst the second.

The present article is an attempt to clarify the relationship of the place where Isaac was bound with the site of Solomon's Temple, and that of the “land of Moriah” ( [Gen 22:2]) with “Mount Moriah” ( [2 Chr 3:1]) in Hebrew Bible historiography. It will also suggest an explanation both for the failure of 1 Kings 6 to give the precise location of the Temple and for the fact that such details are to be found in the parallel passage, 2 Chronicles 3.

The following study treats two distinct but related questions. First, were the Pharisees the dominant party in Palestinian Judaism before the destruction of the temple? And second, did Jesus of Nazareth engage in controversy with them? Many scholars today would answer one or both of these questions negatively. My thesis, however, is that both should be answered affirmatively and, further, that it was precisely the status of the Pharisees as the dominant party that makes intelligible Jesus' charge of hypocrisy.

Factual and theological riddles continue to cluster around Charles Chauncy (1705–1787), pastor of the First (“Old Brick”) Church in Boston and the one most deserving of the title “theologian of the American Revolution.” No one knows the exact place of his burial. It has not yet been determined whether he wrote several anonymous treatises attributed to him (including the anti-revivalistic tract A Wonderful Narrative), and in many recent publications and index files of major libraries he is still confused with his great-grandfather of the same name, the second president of Harvard University from 1654 to 1671–72.

New Testament interpreters have long puzzled over the meaning of the saying, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22; Luke 9:60), and although many ingenious solutions have been proposed, none has been generally convincing. It is surprising that Jewish burial practices have not been brought into this discussion. For the burial practices of first-century Jews in Palestine are well known: many tombs have been carefully excavated, and several rabbinic texts explicitly discuss the care of the dead. Yet this information has never (to my knowledge) been brought to bear on Matt 8:21–22. In this paper, I propose that secondary burial, a widespread burial custom among Jews in first-century Palestine, can solve the riddle of these verses. Against the background of secondary burial, both the meaning of the disciple's question and the force of Jesus' response become clear. In particular, it is not necessary to suppose, as many interpreters do, that Jesus was talking about the “spiritually” dead. On the contrary, if the references to the dead are taken literally, the saying sounds both ironic and eschatological.

Augustine's assimilation of Christ to wisdom in the philosophical tradition established a paradigm for method in theology. If in the beginning was the Word, and that primordial Word was analogous to intellectual concept rather than oral discourse, then in ideal imitation the theologian was a dialectician rather than a rhetorician. Yet if Christ is wisdom and the language of wisdom is dialectic, why did he speak rhetorically? Why the simile rather than the syllogism? Augustine proposed that scripture is divine baby talk. The academic business of theology became its education into human mature language by translating its images into ideas. Yet a hermeneutical and exegetical revolution since the late nineteenth century has, through historical and literary criticisms, restored scripture as rhetoric to its legitimate religious status. The conventional apologetics of pabulum is now intolerable. This alteration in norm is influencing, in the history of theology, an evaluation of the tradition as rhetoric. The research, although belated, may prove as revisionist as in scriptural studies. As the master rhetorician of anti-rhetoric was Augustine, a critical examination of the rationale for his methodological displacement of the scriptural norm with the contemplative ideal is cogent.

In manuscript no. 1142B (Jl 142) in the Library of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, on fol. 267r, there is a previously unpublished Canon List. The manuscript is a Miscellany, in the notrgir script, and although undated it cannot be very old. It contains various theological and homiletical works, and the list is followed, on fol. 268V, by a work given in the Catalogue as “Ezekiel." The text of the list was copied from the manuscript. The chief abbreviations have been resolved.

Although evangelicalism is “spiritual” and empiricism is “natural,” the great principle of empiricism, that one must see for oneself and be in the presence of the thing one knows, applies as well to evangelical faith. Each of these two methodologies operates along a continuum that joins emotion to intellect; each joins externality to words through “ideas/ideals of sensation,” that is, through either perception or grace-in-perception or both. While empiricism refers to immediate contact with and direct impact from objects and subjects in time and place, evangelicalism entertains the notions that religious truth is concerned with experiential presuppositions and that experience need not be nonreligious. On the basis of the experiential common denominator between empiricism and evangelicalism, through the “both/and” logic of philosophical theology, I argue that John Wesley (1703–91), founder of British Methodism, and Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), leader of the American Great Awakening, theologize empiricism. They ground transcendentalism in the world, balance religious myths and religious morality with scientific reverence for fact and detail, and ally empirical assumptions with “disciplined” spirit. Above all, they share the simultaneously rational and sensationalist reliance on experience as the avenue to both natural and spiritual knowledge.

The martyr stories, the earliest hagiographical writings, were not composed simply as memorials to the courage of those who preferred death to apostasy. Their authors recorded the stories both to preserve beliefs and to enforce norms of behavior. The authors of the martyr stories often provided explicit testimony to why they wrote. They expected the stories to proclaim the validity of the charismatic authority of the martyrs, to manifest martyrs as exemplars of virtue, and to show people how to react during interrogation by Roman authorities. Thus the readers were inscribed in the narratives as potential martyrs. They came to know the attitudes they ought to have, the phrases they should use to parry the insults of their tormentors, and the prayers they should offer for endurance. In this way those who promulgated the martyr stories achieved or attempted to achieve some control over the behavior and beliefs of readers by assigning value to community standards. In doing so the stories provided cohesion and stability for their churches.

Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century Mormon founder, is often accounted for in one of three ways. Either he was a prophet in the almost fundamentalist sense that many Mormons hold him to have been, or he was a charlatan as many others have judged, or else he was a mentally deranged charismatic. In what has been the most influential study of Smith during the last half-century, Fawn Brodie bridged the latter two categories. Brodie alleged that Mormonism's founder was initially a conscious fraud who fabricated his first visionary experience; only gradually, by a series of wondrous psychological acrobatics, did he later come to take himself seriously as one called of God.

When the inaugural volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in February 1776, the English public greeted it with a mixture of veneration and anxiety. Many agreed that it was a classic work, but some critics, mostly clergy, questioned its treatment of Christianity. Scholars have approached the ensuing controversy from several angles: Gibbon's reticence reduced it, theologically speaking, to a sampling of doctrinal viewpoints; considered as a literary phenomenon, the controversy merely provoked Gibbon to relegate his opponents to literary oblivion; historiographically, it affirmed the subordination of religious to civil history and the application of philosophical principles to the study of early Christianity. Though each is valid, none of these approaches accounts sufficiently for the historical context in which the controversy occurred. Yet an appreciation of the historical context of the controversy is necessary if Gibbon's achievement and eighteenth-century England's perspective on the problem of Christian origins are to be understood. This article observes Gibbon as he perfected his approach to religion, pondered the criticisms of his opponents, and sought to vindicate himself. In contrast to previous appraisals, it emphasizes that Gibbon was an occasional polemicist, that the controversy affected him deeply, and that, judged by contemporary standards, his critics successfully exploited their advantages in the debate.

The study of medieval Judaism was revolutionized by the late S. D. Goitein with A Mediterranean Society, his multilayered study of the medieval Jewish communities in Egypt based on the documents from the Cairo Genizah. For while previously the Genizah had been mined for important rabbinic documents and for the history of the philosophers and Geonim, Goitein's research sought to provide an account of the religion and life of all classes of society.

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of interest in critical biblical studies in the United States. Though many colonial religious leaders were well trained in the area of biblical studies because of their European educations, this field of study declined to a very low state in America in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth-century revival of biblical studies in America, led by scholars such as Edward Robinson, William E. Channing, Andrews Norton, and Moses Stuart, was a homegrown, broad-based movement that ran the gamut of theological positions from conservative Calvinist to Unitarian. One unique feature of this movement was its interest in the biblical criticism of German writers; indeed, many works of German scholarship were translated into English by these American writers long before they achieved circulation in England. The resulting American biblical scholarship flourished not only at seminaries and divinity schools, but also on more practical levels. Edward Robinson, for example, led an expedition to the Middle East to study the geography and antiquities of the Holy Land. This scholarship was also tied to the prevalent missionary impulse, resulting in the translation of the Bible into many additional languages, especially those of the Middle and Far Eastern missionary fields.

In a lecture in Horticultural Hall in Boston on Sunday 3 March 1872 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the social reformer and religious radical, praised “The Character of the Buddha.” He ended his very sympathetic portrait by alluding to King Asoka's discovery of the tomb of the Buddha. Those who opened the tomb, so the story goes, found the lamps that had been lighted two hundred years earlier still burning and the flowers that had been offered in homage still fresh and fragrant. Higginson saw a parallel to his own age: “More than two thousand years have now passed, and we are opening this tomb again; the lights still burn, the flowers are still fresh, the perfume of that noble life, yet remains immortal.” In some ways, Higginson's comment seems appropriate: literate Americans of his generation were learning more and more about Buddhism and its founder; and, although most interpreters during the 1860s and 1870s struggled with its distinctiveness, some found Buddha's life and teachings praiseworthy. Yet Americans had begun to pry open “the tomb of the Buddha” decades earlier, and not everyone was as blinded by the sudden illumination or as overcome by the sweet fragrance as Higginson.

In Catholic social thought since the time of Leo XIII, two important developments have influenced justificatory arguments for the institution of property. First, the traditional language of the “common good” has been augmented by an emphasis in recent encyclicals upon the dignity of persons and the rights of individuals. I shall analyze the warrants for this shift in formulation to see how changes in the language of justification reveal both continuities and discontinuities with the earlier tradition. Second, in the past century of Roman Catholic social thought, understandings of natural law have been subject to significant revision. Especially since the time of John XXIII, the papal encyclicals have sought both to “historicize” and to update those elements in the traditional discussion of property that fail to reflect modern socioeconomic circumstances. In reviewing the recent encyclical literature on these themes, I will consider how, or whether, earlier discussion can be successfully modernized without undercutting the raison d'etre of natural-law terminology in the process.

Paradox, a subject that has intrigued philosophers and scientists since ancient times, not long ago also captured the attention of many literary critics and historians of religion. A key analytic term among the old New Critics, paradox—along with irony and ambiguity—was for decades taken as central to poetic language, the force of which was understood to derive from the play of multiple, often contradictory meanings. In history of religions, a concept of paradox was essential in the monumental work of Mircea Eliade, who repeatedly pointed to the power of conjoined opposites in myth. To many scholars in both fields, these paradoxes of poetry and myth have by now become passe—taken for granted, perhaps, but no longer topics for further exploration. They gain new significance, however, with the increasing interest in the critical study of academic writing over the last few years. For despite the hard-minded academic stance found in much contemporary religio-historical writing, the paradoxes familiar from religion and literature still often come into play, indeed, sometimes to explore striking contradictions that are posed in the fashion of paradoxes from science.

John Calvin urged Peter Martyr Vermigli to leave Zurich to serve as pastor of the Italian church in Geneva. If Martyr were to join him, Calvin wrote in his February 1557 letter, he would share the task of giving biblical lectures and might even “resign the whole task to you, so far as your convenience will permit.” In a September letter to the Zurich Senate, Calvin again invited Martyr to Geneva where his mission would be “to the incredible profit of both the men of his own nation and ourselves.”